Abstract

In order to create algorithmic art using the wealth of documents available on the internet, artists must discover strategies for organizing those documents. In this paper I demonstrate techniques for organizing and collaging sounds from the user-contributed database at freesound.org. Sounds can be organized in a graph structure by exploiting aural similarity relationships provided by freesound.org, and lexical relationships provided by wordnik.com. Music can then be generated from these graphs in a variety of ways. In the final section, I elaborate on three pieces I've generated from sound graphs using cellular automata, and swarm intelligence.